on fat, trans, and the pitfalls of comparing identities.

A colleague and I recently gave a training on how to be a good ally to trans communities. For those who’ve been through similar trainings, it’s nothing earth-shattering: respect people’s gender pronouns, don’t ask people when they’re having “the surgery,” and generally avoid forcing loads of intrusive questions or making a slew of judgments based on someone’s identity (or what you believe their identity to be). Basic, right?

But something surprising happened at this training. Many of the cisgender (non-trans) people in the room were struggling for analogies, for parallel identities and oppressions to help them understand a community that’s new to them. But what surprised me was the number of people who compared being trans to being fat. According to many, their perception of whether or not a trans person is “successfully passing” (that is: presenting as a gender-conforming person) is just like their perception of someone’s thinness. If someone is passing well, or if they’ve lost weight, praise them. If you clock them as trans, or if they’ve gained weight, it would be rude to mention. These comparisons were made left, right and center.

And as these comparisons were made, I felt myself begin to shake, from frustration, from sadness, from powerlessness, from anger. Good as their intentions were, as a fat person, I felt more and more shameful, more and more erased, less and less valid. I can only imagine how trans-identified people in the room felt.

We hear these comparisons all the time. Being trans is like being gay. Being a gay couple is like being an interracial couple. Being fat is like being a person with a disability. And everything, apparently, is just like being a person of color.

To their credit, this is often the way that allies—and many community members—struggle to find the language of oppression that hasn’t been taught to them. They’re reaching to link our struggles, and that’s a good impulse. The problem is, they’re doing it in a way that is substantially flawed and makes it deeply difficult to build relationships, coalitions and movements across lines of identity.

why we compare identities.

Overwhelmingly, we do it because our intentions are good. Sometimes we do it to better understand allied communities—to deepen our understanding of the needs and experiences of other communities. Sometimes we do it to give voice to our own experience of oppression in a culture that doesn’t provide us with the tools or opportunities to speak for our experiences of marginalization. Again, the intention here is good: we’re trying to start conversations that establish various forms of oppression as real, valid and harmful.

The problem is that identity comparisons are often overarching and ineffective—and they don’t really help us meet those goals. While our intentions are good, these comparisons don’t create the impacts we hope for. So what I want to talk about today is the unintended impacts they create. So: what are the challenges with comparing identities, communities and movements?

(Note: I’ve focused here on race, LGBT, and fat, because those are the examples that I deal with most frequently, but there are many, many more. Feel free to add yours in the comments.)

problems with comparing identities.

It glosses over substantial differences in experience in a way that can be hurtful, insulting and alienating. After Prop 8 banned same-gender marriage in California, gay news magazine the Advocate published a cover story that declared that “gay is the new black.” The problem is, this is frequently stated by white queer people. And while white queer people have historically experienced hate crimes, police raids, and a whole lot more, we haven’t been lynched, been forced to sit at the back of the bus, or experienced the accumulation of oppression over generations on a single family or neighborhood. Black/African-American communities have. Intentional or not, claiming that “gay is the new black” is deeply disrespectful, and it’s often experienced as such.

It’s an escape hatch for ally education. When we compare our identities to others that we don’t share, we can unintentionally imply that we’ve got nothing to learn. And sometimes we can even believe it.

The logic goes like this: if I say that my identity is just like yours, then presto!, I have nothing new to learn about your experience or needs, because they’re the same as mine. And if I already know all there is to know, I don’t need to change anything about what I’m doing to make spaces, communities or movements more accessible to people with differing identities.

In that way, it also paves the way for pushing aside identity-specific needs. If being fat is like having a disability, then I just need to make this event accessible for me, and it will automatically be accessible for you, right? Wrong. Many fat people don’t seek need ramps, bars, or ASL interpretation. And making the comparison keeps us from grappling with the complexity of the identities of those around us. It keeps us from growing, and it keeps others from participating.

problems with comparing movements.

It claims someone else’s work. I’m a young white queer woman. I wasn’t alive during the highest profile work of the Civil Rights movement, and I didn’t begin to take on anti-racist work until very recently, in the scheme of racial justice history in the US. But if I say fat acceptance is “the next great Civil Rights movement,” I’m claiming that work as my own and conflating oppressions in a way that (rightfully) alienates communities of color.

Sometimes, it implies that other forms of oppression are “over” or “fixed.” Frequently, we hear that fat is the last acceptable discrimination. The implication here is that other forms of oppression are somehow remedied or obsolete. Racism isn’t “fixed.” We haven’t “cured” our society of xenophobia. But that’s the implication.

And all of that alienates potential allies. These comparisons, well-intentioned though they may be, divide our communities against one another. LGBT communities know the pain of police raids, but we don’t readily and uniformly ally ourselves with immigrant communities, who face raids and deportation at staggering rates. Fat people know the sting of discrimination and exclusion (see: Southwest Airlines policies), but many of us still dismiss concerns over ableism. And when we draw sloppy parallels that make broad generalizations (while failing to pinpoint shared experience and values), we alienate the communities we are best positioned to support—and that are best positioned to support us.

drawing effective parallels.

This doesn’t mean that drawing parallels is out of the question—it just means that comparisons must be made carefully and thoughtfully. Here are some ways to draw thoughtful, nuanced parallels.

Point to shared opposition & tactics of oppression. A great example of this: Suzanne Pharr’s stellar essay, The Common Elements of Oppression.In it, Pharr discusses the ways the common tactics used to oppress—but she is careful not to conflate communities or types of oppression. Both immigrant communities and LGBT communities are accused of seeking “special rights.” That’s a tactic used to divide and marginalize us. That means our struggles are linked—it does not mean they are the same through and through.

Point to shared needs. Since our opposition (and their tactics) are shared, our communities often experience similar needs. So when budget cuts target low-income people and communities of color, our needs are shared. When bullying targets trans youth and fat youth, our needs are shared. And when oppression and privilege are so poorly understood as a whole, many of our communities can benefit from some serious public education.

Be specific. Sweeping generalizations (a la “gay is the new black”) are dicey at best, so specificity can be helpful. Are you trying to draw a parallel between communities’ shared experiences? Their shared oppressors? Similar institutionalized discrimination? Be sure to voice what you are specifically thinking.

what else you can do.

Support the work of allied movements. If you’re a white queer person, like me, fight against police profiling and brutality. If you haven’t experienced the criminal justice system as a prisoner, work for prisoner’s rights for those who have. Believe in them, yes, and do something. Write your elected official. Phone bank. Attend a rally. Taking action is the most meaningful way to contribute.

Speak about the oppression you face on its own terms. Grant it the integrity to speak for itself. I feel fatphobia deeply enough on a daily basis that I can describe it in extraordinary detail. I know, and trust, that those experiences speak for themselves, and do not need to rely on broad parallels to others’ oppression.

Use “I” statements. I know, it’s well-worn and hackneyed territory, but it works. Speak from your own experience, and avoid speaking on behalf of communities with which you don’t identify.

Interrogate your own privilege. At the core of these comparisons is a deep desire to help those around us more fully grasp our own understanding of oppression. And that desire is often paired with the internalized entitlement that comes with privilege—and that’s what creates the impulse to reach so readily for someone else’s experience in order to describe our own.

Continuing to challenge our own sense of privilege and the internalized ways in which we appropriate others’ experiences is one of the most lasting ways to stem the tide of the comparisons that divide us while seeking to unite us. And while that tide goes out, we can build more meaningful relationships across identities, and stronger coalitions across movements for true and lasting social justice.

What about the observation that intersex and transgender people face similar/different oppressions from the medical community? For intersex children medical intervention is considered “necessary,” whereas transgender people who seek surgery aren’t taken seriously or are ignored altogether. I’m thinking of Robert Eads here. Do you think this type of comparison is appropriate?

I simply love this post — for more than one reason. First, It’s wonderful to hear from someone in the LGBT community that it’s insensitive to compare the gay movement with the civil rights movement for African Americans.

Every time I wrap my head and heart around supporting equality for LGBTs — I see or hear something — like Gay is the new Black and I’m enraged. Seriously. Filled with rage. Because not only do I know what Black people have had to put up with since the beginning of all time in this country, I know specifically what my mother, father, grandparents — sister (and myself) endured. Endures.

So right on!

And I love the what else can you do section! Service is the biggest way to have a change of heart. My roommate and I just wrote essays for/against gay marriage, spent days researching the arguments on both sides. Exploring the subject brings up so much because often times we adopt views from others (family, friends, school, church, community bigots) without actually stopping to think about what feels right to us. Learning more about the way too many oppressed communities in our society is the first way to end the ignorance of comparing groups. But it also links them together because they are oppressed. And in 2011, that’s disgusting. And so carving out time to learn about the plight of another culture/community, carving out time to devote to their cause — well, it means that we’re moving towards a place where we can care about people who aren’t in our subgroups. And that empathy is what makes us human.

I thought this was a great article for the most part, but one thing I didn’t like was that you seemed to sort of create a hierarchy of experiences of oppression through some of your discourse – for example, the complaints about the statement “gay is the new black” seemed to be centered around saying that being black was/is more difficult than being gay (it very well may be), and I don’t think this type of comparison is helpful, mostly because it divides us (which you say you are also trying to work against); I think that it could be fixed if you added in the difficulties that gay people experience that black people don’t, to show that it is dismissive for people on both sides of the comparison (which is something that you mention at the beginning of the article).

The direction the training took isn’t that surprising. I might have found your argument compelling if i hadn’t sat in strategy sessions and hearing rooms where non-queer people of color made explicit connections — “likenesses” — between marriage equality and other civil rights efforts sometimes informally described as “more historic.” There is a great deal of equivalence in the establishment’s fear of losing control over racial lines and gender norms. I remember a reporter who interviewed couples lined up to benefit from the District of Columbia’s newly approved civil unions. A large number of the couples were black or interracial (reflecting DC’s demographics) and it was pointed out many saw their right to love very much linked to their other civil rights concerns. I get much more motivated by Martin Luther King Jr’s lines about the “inescapable web” of humanity from Letter from Birmingham Jail. He was beginning to reach out to impoverished whites, not because they were “the new black,” but because a civil rights movement is most productive when it acknowledges our relationships. As we learn in rhetoric, the emotional response you described near the top, while valid, softens your persuasiveness.